5 ms·
Perhaps they mean ISAs
by electronsoup 8mo ago
Perhaps they mean ISAs
- xphos 8mo agoWell x86 at one point, arm both the 32 and 64 bit versions. I think they had RISCV support in their source tree at one point but not really at a commercial level. It does cover a lot different levels of hardware though
- kjs3 8mo agoIs mc68k or PPC still in there anywhere?
- monocasa 8mo agoI'm sure there's vestiges of them somewhere, but the underlying support (the architecture specific parts of the mach portion of the kernel) is gone for those archs.
- mghackerlady 8mo agoI wouldn't be surprised if they keep a minimal Power base maintained behind closed doors. It's how they managed to jump ship to intel so quickly, they never stopped maintaining NeXTSTEPs x86 port
- monocasa 8mo agoI would honestly be shocked if they were. They've been making quite a few changes to the virtual memory code over the past decade, and keeping those vestigial arch's around is a pretty big maintenance burden. It'd probably be less work to just add the arch as if it were new when it's needed at this point since the kernel itself is pretty portable.
- duskwuff 8mo agoI seriously doubt it. Apple's ARM implementation is in a really good place right now. It would take something extremely compelling to get them to consider any other architecture for an application processor, especially considering that it'd mean giving up some degree of control. Power is probably not where Apple would choose to go unless something really unusual happened. It's essentially just IBM's pet architecture at this point.
- mghackerlady 8mo agoWhen I mean minimal arm base, I basically mean making sure XNU at least compiles on PPC64. I don't doubt they'd likely never have a use for it, but they maintained intel support behind closed doors when macos forked from NeXTstep and nobody thought they'd need that
- wiml 8mo agoPPC32/64 of course, and for a long time Darwin still contained remnants of its predecessor's support for SPARC, PA-RISC, and m68k.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- userbinator 8mo agoWhich Apple products run arm32 XNU? Their first Apple Silicon CPUs were already arm64.
- dagmx 8mo agoWell there were still the historical arm32 chips in their iOS devices, but until recently the watches were a cursed arm64_32 (or something like that) which is arm64 with 32 bit pointers iirc.
- xphos 8mo agoI should have just soureced this, They had PowerPC not RISCV in there source tree that was the X factor one. The Arm32 bit variant is closed sourced (leaked before) but was supported until IOS 11. XNU is really old almost 30 years! And before XNU there was the MACH kernel and the larger BSD tree it was built on which is an argument that it probably had a initial MIPs release too but I couldn't source the truth on that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- skissane 8mo agoDoes Apple use macOS in servers in its datacentres? Or are they all Linux? Surely at a minimum they need macOS for CI. Apple does have one advantage here-they can legally grant themselves permission to run macOS internally on non-Apple hardware, and I don’t believe doing so legally obliges them to extend the same allowance to their customers. But that might give them a reason to keep x86_64 alive for internal use, since that platform (still) gives you more options for server-class hardware than ARM does
- jabwd 8mo agoThey do run Apple Silicon in data centers, so perhaps another custom version of Darwin + their system frameworks. It is hard to tell without some leaks :)
- glhaynes 8mo agoFor Private Cloud Compute: “a new operating system: a hardened subset of the foundations of iOS and macOS tailored to support Large Language Model (LLM) inference workloads while presenting an extremely narrow attack surface.” https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
- skissane 8mo agoI wonder if there is any chance we might see another Xserve? If they’ve got Apple Silicon servers in their own data centres…
- therein 8mo agoThey use Ubuntu on x86-64 servers, at least for iCloud. Backends for iCloud, Photos and Backups etc. are written in Java.
- Longhanks 8mo agoAny sources or more information on that?
- LoganDark 8mo agoIIRC, Apple uses 'platform' to refer to an SoC integration. For example, M1, M2 and etc. are separate platforms. M5 in Vision Pro is a separate platform than M5 in MacBook Pro. I believe Apple's XNU does somewhat still support non-Apple Silicon as well though.
- fragmede 8mo agoYeah they're was that whole x86 thing thru did for quite a while.
- simonh 8mo agoTwice, on the basis that NEXT used the same kernel and that ran on 68k and Intel when Apple bought them and later ported it for Power PC. When Steve Jobs went back to Apple, for a long time he ran NEXT on a Thinkpad.
- mghackerlady 8mo agoNeXTSTEP also ran on SPARC iirc
- pjmlp 8mo agoOpenSTEP actually.
- mghackerlady 8mo agoOpenSTEP had SPARC support, yes, but NeXTSTEPs last release had support for m68k, x86, and SPARC. 3.3 had support for PA-RISC